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January 1, 2018

Unable to even come close to SSDs in terms of performance, hard disk makers have chosen to compete with capacity. A SSD over 1TB in size starts to become expensive, especially for consumers, so HDD makers Seagate and Western Digital have gone for massive capacity, introducing drives with up to 14TB of capacity. But now Seagate promises greater speed thanks to a new drive head technology. Dubbed the multi-actuator technology, it is a simple idea that’s been around a while but wasn’t economically viable in the past due to higher component costs.

Many organizations are making the move to the cloud, but 73% of cloud migration projects are taking a year or longer to complete, according to a report from Velostrata and Dimensional Research. Of that 73%, some 30% said they believe their migration will take between one and two years. The remaining 43% said they think that their cloud migration will last longer than two years.

The U.S. Payments Forum has released a white paper to help ATM owners avoid and troubleshoot common problems related to EMV transactions. EMV Troubleshooting Guide for ATM Owners and Operators was developed by the forum's ATM working committee and is available now for a complimentary download at the forum website.

The future of advertising via people's cellphones is more about branded content – or ads that look like editorial articles – over Internet display ads, a new report by researcher WARC suggests. Businesses are still grappling with how to advertise to people via their phones, with 380 million mobile devices using ad-blockers worldwide. Consumers are blocking ads on their cellphones in greater numbers than on PCs, with 236 million desktop devices using the software, according to analytics company PageFair's most recent statistics.

For nine years, Javelin has been benchmarking identity protection vendors. Javelin recognizes leading direct-to-consumer providers and plans that offer the best consumer-facing prevention, detection, and resolution capabilities. Javelin examines the growth and transformation of the identity protection services industry and assesses market size and fraud trends, new partnership channels, and consumer preferences for identity protection services plans. The Javelin Identity Protection Leader Awards are given in following categories:

Non-malware attacks accounted for the majority of all attacks in 2017, and ransomware grew to a $5 billion industry, new data shows. Fileless malware attacks using PowerShell or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) tools accounted for 52% of all attacks, beating out malware-based attacks for the first time, according to Carbon Black's 2017 Threat Report.

The footprints of marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) systems seem to overlap — systems handle leads, contacts and companies — there is sufficient vagueness and confusion on these topics (due at least in part to branding antics) to cloud the issue. This article covers both marketing automation and CRM.

In 2017, the U.S. payments landscape underwent significant change. One of the most important ingredients for this change was the arrival of the P2P app Zelle. The app, created as collective effort by seven major U.S. banks to provide users an alternative to payment apps like PayPal and Venmo, has so far gathered an impressive number of FIs on its network.

In the past year, many large businesses have reaped the cost savings, efficiency and security benefits of faster-payment initiatives led by the Federal Reserve, NACHA and FinTechs. In contrast, few small to midsize businesses (SMBs) have had access to e-payment solutions that meet their unique needs, forcing many to accept the slow nature of paper checks and the associated negative impacts. he median cost of receiving a paper check for organizations with annual revenues below $1 billion is between $2.01 and $4.00, according to AFP. This article looks at some of the benefits of moving away from checks in favor of v-cards.

SD-WAN is the hottest topic in networking today. On the one hand, analyst reports state that this industry is in its infancy with less than 5% adoption through 2017. On the other hand, the same analysts project over 50% customer adoption in the next 36 months. Why has adoption been modest to-date, and why is 10X acceleration expected now? The answer lies in understanding the differences between the first generation of SD-WAN (Gen1) and the second generation of SD-WAN (Gen2).

In America, 13.4 million people work from home. According to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, that is more than double the amount that telecommuted in 2005. Work from home is becoming more and more popular—possibly from the influx of new Millennials in the workplace. Compared to other generations, Millennials are the biggest proponents for telecommuting, with 92 percent of Millennials desiring the option to work remotely, even if it is just one to two days a week. Another study found that, when looking for work, 95 percent of Millennials say work/life balance is most important to them.